As more of a casual X fan, I'd never heard of this (thank you Amazon Prime). I thought I was gonna get a flabby, pretentious, or just poorly-made film around some vintage concert footage. Oh, how pleased I am to have been proved wrong. I loved this movie.The director and editors create a rhythm that evokes the feel of early 80's LA, and of post punk in general. We also get to hear from each of the band's four members; loved the backstories on all of these talented musicians. They speak well, they perform, they entertain. And all with a sincere joy and respect for the music they play.Most importantly, the concert footage is Kick Ass! X in their prime (1982/3 I think)...really great rock n roll!If you like X at all, or 80's-era Los Angeles, or this style of music in general, you need to see this.

I have seen an unholy amount of punk documentary and biopics; maybe even more than that. For whatever reason every band that half filled a bar has a film about their career/supposed influence. Once Arab On Radar got their own film you knew things had gone too far. Those quickie fan films can be exciting, and occasionally interesting...and sometimes you even find yourself half drunk and screaming in the background. But they rarely achieve the status as film, really just home videos for the die hards.The Unheard Music is the exception that proves the rule. Maybe due to being produced when the market/distribution plan would have been nebulous at best, this comes across as an independent and brilliant piece of art, which just happens to feature one of the first wave LA's best punk bands. Unheard Music is constructed like a collage, like one of those bootleg video mixtapes that were floating around the underground back in the day. Your basic interview, performance, rehearsal sequences are intercut with found footage and various Exene based weirdness.The true greatness of the film is the illustration of how X could never possibly find themselves in any subsection of the mainstream. For a band that is so informed by the classic sounds of American rock and roll, for a band that would have had dance hits in 1957, it is disheartening to listen to sleazy label suits babble about how the entire country would not "get" X. It's obnoxious at best to think those weasels are making value judgments about my taste based on geography. But then maybe that does explain Nickelback.This is a fresh an exciting film about not just X, but what a statement it once was to say you were into punk. It took a certain amount of effort since the powers that be actively kept you from hearing this music. Wasn't on the radio, TV, or in suburban record stores. Makes you really understand how much of an uphill battle artist-musicians have.

I love X, I love seeing them live, but this movie added very little to the music. The band seems kind of halfhearted about doing the film, their stories are not that interesting. When they go out on tour trying to get their music heard, there's not a single foot of film from the tour; instead, there's a cutesy montage of postcards.As for the live footage, a good portion of it is from a shoot made expressly for the film, and to judge by the credits, at least half the songs are either videos or lip- synched.On the whole, the live X in Decline of Western Civilization is far more compelling than the whole of The Unheard Music.

I own this video and have seen it a few times...I love X...they're one of the best live bands I've ever seen. That said, this is a video about a band that should have become extremely famous and wealthy, but didn't. They came at a bad time when punk was big, but not big in a way that anyone really made any money from it (before Green Day). But there aren't many documentaries about "unheard" bands, and not many about people as talented as the members of X.